There are times when I am reminded that my book smarts do not translate into common sense. These times have gotten fewer and farther between as I’ve gotten older and either learned from my bumbles or picked up on how certain things work. Last week I missed a post on this blog due to one of the biggest no-common-sense flubs I’ve ever committed. I don’t find it particularly funny YET – that’ll probably take a year or two I think – but I’m sure other people will, and I deserve any ridicule I get from it.

My husband and I moved to Wyoming about a year and a half ago. For most of that time, there has been a water bottle living in the kitchen that has been in my way, but it had gotten to the point where “on top of the knife block” was where it “belonged.” This water bottle was annoying because it couldn’t stand up on its own and it was full of what I assumed was water. I say “assumed” because it had a black sleeve that it lived in, so I couldn’t actually see anything. Despite these annoyances I’d never really questioned this water bottle because my husband grew up in the Rockies and has done a lot more hiking than I ever have. I just assumed that it was a specialty water bottle with a very specific purpose.

So, Friday morning I woke up and immediately got dressed because that was the day one of our friends was coming over to help me get rid of our old mattress and box spring since neither of us have a vehicle that could haul them to the dump. I started breakfast and planned out the cleaning that needed to happen before our friend arrived. I started tidying the kitchen and picked up the water bottle to examine it more closely. I verified again that it did not stand on its own, then realized it also had a trigger and a bright orange trigger lock with instructions printed on it: “SLIDE OFF BEFORE USE”.

“What kind of water bottle needs a trigger?” I thought as I removed the trigger lock.

The only smart thing about what happened next was that I pointed the nozzle away from me. I pressed the trigger and a very loud, very large stream of pressurized liquid sprayed out and essentially attacked our potted lime tree. I released the trigger and glanced at the water bottle again, trying to figure out why the hell the contents were under pressure. That was when I finally registered the logo on the black sleeve. It said “UDAP Bear Spray” with a silhouette of a bear. That’s right. Not a water bottle, but bear spray. I sprayed BEAR SPRAY in my kitchen.

In the few moments it took me to process this fact, I started to feel the effects. I knew I needed to get the window open pronto, which meant wading into the spray zone because the lime tree was by the only window in the room. As soon as I yanked the window open I ran for the back door to open it and get some air flow going. That didn’t work out because occasionally our knob sticks despite being unlocked and the dead bolt being drawn back. After frantically struggling with it for about fifteen seconds I gave up and ran upstairs to the bedroom where my husband was awake but still in bed.

I was explaining that I was a fucking idiot when I realized my eyes were stinging, and I spent the next few minutes in the bathroom rinsing them out in the sink. We opened the window in our bedroom, which was a MISTAKE because it drew the air upstairs and we started coughing up a storm. My husband managed to open the back door downstairs, then grabbed his respirator that he normally uses for jewelry and got in the shower while I coughed and hacked and had my nasal passage flowing out my nostrils. I opened the rest of the windows while throwing Kleenex after used Kleenex in the trashcan I was carrying around with me, then went and sat on the back steps.

I managed to grab my phone and spent the next few minutes researching how to clean up bear spray. That was when I learned it was pepper spray on steroids, which makes sense because it’s intended for use when a freaking BEAR is charging you. Essentially, normal pepper spray used by law enforcement and individuals has anywhere from 0.18% to 1.33% capsaicin, which is the chemical that makes peppers hot and is what causes the irritation. Bear spray, on the other hand, has 1%-2% capsaicin, making it more powerful. Other ingredients include oils, which make the capsaicin stick to your skin and other surfaces. To clean it off surfaces, like a kitchen counter, most people recommend Dawn dish soap.

While I was learning, I heard my husband, through the open window, coughing in our bedroom again. He got dressed and we evacuated the house. He told me as we climbed into my car that he’d almost puked three times and the only reason he hadn’t was because he hadn’t eaten yet. I took him to McDonald’s for breakfast and we sat in the parking lot of a local park at 8 AM eating hash browns and orange juice with the windows rolled down. I was relieved to hear him say he was frustrated but not angry with me. I told him I wouldn’t blame him if he was, but he got his frustration out by telling all his friends and family what I’d done. I called my mom, who was on the second day of a vacation with my grandfather and two younger sisters. She laughed until she cried, and she cried hard. I’d say a solid 50% of that call was her laughing and struggling to breathe.

“I’m only laughing because it wasn’t me,” she wheezed.

My husband’s friends’ reactions were balanced between horror and entertainment. One is a former corrections officer who was generally horrified about the whole thing. When I saw him earlier this week he told me a story about using pepper spray on an inmate and afterward finding a perfect silhouette of the guy surrounded by the orange residue on the wall. One of his college roommates told my husband to “watch his back” but that the whole thing was also “metal”. After I dropped him off at work, with the promise to bring him lunch later, he texted me and said his coworker said that tree will never attack us again. He’s a retired sheriff’s deputy who found the situation hilarious.

Upon my return to the house, I opened doors and windows, turned on fans, lit candles, donned one of the many masks we have lying around thanks to COVID-19, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and got to work. I wiped down all the surfaces in the kitchen I could find with Dawn and water. Some had an orange residue on them, but others I just wasn’t willing to take a chance on not cleaning. I ran the dishwasher, then mopped the floor. I could still smell the spray, but it was better. Thankfully this was the first really beautiful day of the season – blue skies, bright sun, light breeze, and seventy degrees. This is not a guarantee in early April in Wyoming, so it was pure luck that the perfect conditions for airing out a house existed. By the time our friend showed up to get the mattress and box spring about 1 PM he couldn’t smell it.

But wait! There’s more! I left the windows and back door open all day and only closed them when the sun went down and things started getting cold again (we live in the desert, after all). The smell was still present, but faint. My husband is more sensitive to this kind of thing than me, and he said he could still feel it when he got home. I didn’t notice it too much until we sat down for our virtual D&D session that evening. The dining room is connected to the kitchen and as the night wore on I could feel it in my throat and nose. Clearly I’d missed something in my clean up. Just as we were finishing up for the night, my gaze rested on the blinds on the kitchen window. To my horror, I realized they’d been down when the bear spray was released and I’d raised them when I opened the window. I got up and could clearly see the orange residue on the little white slats.

Without thinking, at 10 PM, I grabbed paper towels, put water and Dawn in a spray bottle, and started cleaning the blinds. This was a mistake on two levels. First, this reactivated the bear spray and we both start coughing again. It wasn’t as bad as that morning, but it still made our friends concerned. Second, I forgot to put gloves on. The capsaicin got all over my bare hands. I realized my mistake halfway through the wipe down and hurried through it, planning to continue in the morning. I threw everything in the sink, washed my hands with Dawn, turned on the range fan and the downstairs bathroom fan, and followed my husband to bed.

My hands were burning. I would compare it to the time I burned my palm on a metal pan handle that had just been in the oven at 500 degrees, except this was on both hands, front, back, and sides. I didn’t want to crawl into bed and risk transferring the oils to the sheets, so I pulled on a pair of knit gloves – you know, the kind that will be completely soaked if you put them on a kid and send them out in the snow. My research told me the effects of bear spray should wear off after 45 minutes, so I sat in bed and watched YouTube while trying to ignore the burning. Luckily I wasn’t one of the unfortunate few who had lasting effects. Right around 11:15 the burning had subsided enough that I was comfortable going to sleep, but I kept the gloves on. Throughout the night I would wake up and the burning would be going strong on one hand, or even one part of one hand, but be fine on the rest. It came and went, not always on the same spot. In the morning the first thing I did was wash my hands with Dawn again (and be sure you use cold water. Hot or warm water makes the burning worse).

After my husband left for work I opened the windows again, lit candles again, put on gloves, donned another mask, and tackled the kitchen blinds. It took me an hour because I needed to go over them two or three times each, and it was slat by slat. Then I had to do the same thing on the other side of the slats. I was lucky that day too – it was another beautiful day. When my husband came home he wasn’t bothered anymore.

The two people I expected to get the most grief from – my college roommate and my sister-in-law – were very understanding. My college roommate grew up in Montana and had told me stories of going hiking as a family and spotting a bear on the trail. She was kind enough to say that some items, if they stay in the same place long enough and we’re used to seeing them every day, never fully register in our brains. My sister-in-law, who lives in Alaska, told me a story of a woman who’d misunderstood one of their friends while camping and sprayed an entire can of bear spray around their tent while everyone else watched in horror.

Now, I will present two rationalizations in my defense. They are weak and should not hold up to ridicule, but they are what I have. First, I grew up in Iowa. I never had to worry about seeing a bear on a hike and never had to know what bear spray looked like. Second, today I picked up the bear spray (having replaced its safety pin days ago) and removed the black sleeve. There was a significant difference. So, I partially blame the stupid black sleeve (maybe it gets 1% of the blame. I’ll take the other 99%). I’ve provided pictures below for you to see what I mean.

I would also like to state that when the bear spray lived on top of the knife block, it was always face down, at an angle. I was most used to seeing the “water bottle” like this:

That’s all the rationalization I will offer. I did a stupid thing. I was unobservant and not careful. I have learned my lesson. Hopefully other people will get a laugh out of this, and maybe somebody will even learn from it. I know I took some lessons away from this experience.

1. I don’t ever want to be sprayed with bear spray or pepper spray.
2. If I am sprayed with either, Dawn dish soap is my friend.
3. My husband is one of the most patient men I’ve ever met. He never once yelled at me or blamed me for something that was clearly my idiot fault.
4. Gloves are great when dealing with capsaicin.
5. I now know how bear spray works, what it looks like, and how it affects people.

One final comment. The lime tree that was the initial victim of my experimental spray is a Bearss lime tree. Because I am unoriginal, we named it Bear. So, technically, the bear spray was used on a bear.